1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to the design and manufacture of structures and, more specifically, to a method and system for optimizing the vibrational characteristics of a structure.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional structural analysis techniques can be used to manufacture and/or modify a wide range of different structures, including musical instruments, buildings, airframes, surfboards, and missiles, among other things. A designer of a structure may implement one or more different structural analysis techniques to design and build the structure to have particular vibrational characteristics. For example, a designer of a guitar may implement a shaker coupled to the guitar to perform an acoustic sweep of the guitar. One or more sensors may then record data indicative of the vibrational characteristics of the guitar. Based on the recordations performed by the sensors, the designer of the guitar may then make structural modifications to the guitar in order to manipulate the vibrational characteristics of the guitar.
One drawback of conventional techniques is that a designer of a structure typically must rely on trial-and-error to modify the structure such that the structure has particular vibrational characteristics. The trial-and-error process is quite time-consuming for the designer. Such an approach is also unpredictable and, therefore, does not produce reliable results. Another drawback of conventional techniques is that the designer of the structure cannot identify particular structural modifications that result in particular changes to the vibrational characteristics of the structure. Returning to the example above, the designer of a guitar could not easily identify a specific structural modification to perform on the guitar in order to modify the amplitude of a particular frequency associated with the guitar. Thus, the designer could not easily or effectively fine-tune the structure of the guitar.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more effective way to analyze and design a structure having particularized vibrational characteristics.